The typical-farm concept for assessing competitiveness in low-input dairy farming

malkekvæg7Tuning a consistent information flow between models is a main challenge, since huge variation exists across countries. WP6 has created a new definition and characterization of a typical low input dairy farm, intending to be a better anchor for information flow between different modelling levels.

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Country specific analysis of competitiveness and resilience of low input dairy farms across Europe

SOLID WP6 aims to evaluate the economic performance and potential of low input (LI) and organic farms to adopt novel strategies. Edition 2 of SOLID News described how a pragmatic LI definition was developed; pragmatic because the definition was developed within limited variables available through FADN data; and to fully exploit it as a tool for further analysis on the profitability of LI farms, allowing exploration of their economic potential in adopting new strategies. An EU-wide analysis has been undertaken to provide a first insight of the relative performance of organic and LI farms compared to conventional farms. In this article, we explore the more country-specific results. This article aims to identify the main differences between countries in terms of income and resilience of high and low input dairy farms to volatile milk and feed prices. 

For further details on country specific results of the low input farms, we advise interested readers to read the summary of deliverable 6.1.

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Modelling European Agriculture with Climate Change for Food Security

MACSUR is a knowledge hub within FACCE-JPI (Joint Programming Initiative for  Agriculture, Climate Change, and Food Security). The FACCE-JPI Scientific Research Agenda defines five core research themes to address the impacts of climate change on European agriculture.

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The economic models in the SOLID project

CAPRI (Common Agricultural Policy Regionalized Impact) is used for simulating and predicting the impact of agricultural and international trade policies at EU policy level. For SOLID purposes, we will represent the dairy sector by two technology variants: low- and high-input dairying. The information needed must be available in FADN, or exogenously supplied consistent with the FADN data.

The Finnish DREMFIA model describes the agricultural supply-demand conditions at the regio­nal or national level. This sector model brings the essential farm-level responses to the market level.

At farm level, we can use ORGPLAN, a farm management tool designed to assess the effects of farm conversion to an organic system. The software is adapted for evaluating the transition from a medium or high input dairy system to a low input or organic, forage-based system.

PAFAMO assesses impact of strategic choice variables in a programming mo­del where resources (capital, land, labor) are scarce. It wants to be a tool to support farmers in assessing the impact of their strategic choices.

The more detailed process models (such as those in WP3 and WP4) must serve as input for PAFAMO and ORGPLAN,  which then will provide exogenous information to sector and policy models.

To guarantee a fluent up-scaling of results from process to macro levels, the concept of typical farms is proposed.